thoughts (and links) of a retired "social scientist" as he tries to make sense of the world.....

what you get here

This is not a blog which expresses instant opinions on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers as jumping-off points for some reflections about our social endeavours.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

The post-war British social democrats

And
to the lives of some of the great British social democrats it has been my
privilege to know – however distantly. So this will be one of several posts…..

I was introduced to Seeger’s radical songs by
an amazing Scottish left-wing couple – Norman and Janey Buchan – just after my election in 1968 as a local councillor in a West of Scotland
shipbuilding town. I became Norman’s election agent in the 1970 General Election
(he had been first elected in 1964, being a well-regarded teacher until then) – and then became Janey’s colleague in Strathclyde
Region in the mid 1970s.

My
rationalistic approach did not find Janey’s exuberant radicalism at all easy –
but her goodness spoke strongly to me. In 1979 she became MEP for Glasgow –
somewhat maverick but respected by many. Norman was an utterly dedicated socialist whose honesty and purity powered into you. He did occupy two junior Ministerial positions but never enjoyed that side of life - his commitments to popular struggles (and culture) were much stronger.....

Coincidentally
I am re-reading one of the best of British political autobiographies of the 20th
century – Denis Healey’s Time of my Life (1989). Healey was someone who did not suffer fools gladly - he famously (in acerbic tones) described the 1979 Labour Party Manifesto foisted on us by the extreme left as "the longest suicide note in history"!Perhaps aptly, the best of the (admittedly few) reviews of his memoirs which I have come
across is Clive James'(of highly-deserved Cultural Amnesia fame). It
is a bit of a retrospective since he wrote it in 2008 and I make no apology for its length - both the subject matter and the reviewer deserve this courtesy!

Healey was born near
London in 1917 and raised mainly in Yorkshire, as the Scholarship Boy of a hard
working family. After grammar school, he gained a double first at Oxford, spent
a brief period as a starry-eyed young Communist, and went on to serve in the
British Army during the Second World War. At Anzio, a graduate course for those
who survived it, he was Military Landing Officer for the British assault
brigade. His experiences in the frustrating Italian campaign, a grim education
in the art of the possible, translated readily to postwar British politics.
After six years as the Labour Party's International Secretary, he was elected
as Member of Parliament for Leeds in 1952, and served for 35 years on Labour's
Front Bench both in power and out.In
Government he was both Defence Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and
in Opposition he was Shadow Foreign Secretary. Whatever the post, he showed
such conspicuous ability that many still wonder why he was never Prime
Minister, but the best answer is probably the most obvious: though he had the
common touch, his superiorities were too striking. Among them was a wide range
of learning, worn without pretension but not easily emulated.

………The
book is a delight to read, and would be significant even if it were dull, because
Healey was such a substantial representative of that generation of British
left-wing idealists in the late 1930s who favoured Communism as an answer to
Fascism, until they found out the hard way that the two brands of
totalitarianism were effectively identical. To put it bluntly, they learned
that grand plans kill.….Delightful
from start to finish, his autobiography is an education in itself,
disheartening only in its implicit suggestion that it takes the near-breakdown
of civilisation to produce a generation of politicians who can appreciate the
value of what was almost lost.

But perhaps we should try to demonstrate its
quality with an initial quotation. Try this:"I
was worried by a streak of intolerance in Gaitskell's nature: he tended to
believe that no one could disagree with him unless they were either knaves or
fools. Rejecting Dean Rusk's advice, he would insist on arguing to a conclusion
rather than to a decision. Thus he would keep a meeting of the Shadow Cabinet
going, long after he had obtained its consent to his proposals, because he
wanted to be certain that everyone understood precisely why he was right."That
comes from page 154 of my paperback edition, and there is something to equal it
on almost every other page of the book. One doesn't say that cultivation ensures
political acumen. If it did, Neville Chamberlain would have been the most
effective Prime Minister in British history. But an empty mind is rarely
reassuring.

I've written here fairly frequently about politicians - and generally negatively. But the social democrats and civil servants who came to power in Britain in the post-war period had an experience and education which was unique...............

A
cultivated man across the whole range of the arts, Healey was a gift from war
to peace. If there had been no war, the dazzling Double First in Greats might
have gone on to be an academic, a scholar, a critic, a writer, a star
broadcaster, or any combination of those five things. But the war sent him into
politics: real politics, Labour politics, not the Communism he had briefly
embraced when too young to know the difference. (Sir Isaiah Berlin once said
that most of those bright young people who enrolled in the Communist Party in
pre-war Britain didn't really want a revolution: they were just liberals who
wanted to feel serious.)

In
parliament, Healey's mere presence on the Labour front bench was enough to make
the Conservatives look like philistines. Not all of them were, but few of those
who weren't had a mind as well-furnished as his. Their culture was part of
their inheritance. He had to acquire his, and went on acquiring it throughout
his career, out of a passion that was never stilled even by the crushing,
necessary boredom of political committee rooms........Nevertheless
he is careful to put in plenty of self-deprecation. Opponents are allowed their
opinions. If it turns out, as it almost invariably does, that Healey's opinion
was better, he tries not to crow. He forgets to record that in 1945 he advised
his fellow Labourites not to be panicked by evidence "that our comrades on
the Continent are being extremist". ........Pushing
tolerance to the limit, Healey even has good words for Harold Wilson. At the
time, Healey's contempt for Wilson's opportunism matched Wilson's fear of
Healey's competence: the multilingual Healey was uniquely qualified to be
Foreign Secretary, so Wilson kept him busy with every post except that.The
good words make Healey's portrait of Wilson even more devastating.

In a Presidential
system, Healey would have for certain taken the top spot, because he was
dynamite on TV. In the British system, however, the party must be pleased
before the people, and never since Gaitskell has an intellectual managed to
please the Labour Party, unless, like Wilson, he is ready to wear disguise, or,
like Michael Foot, to talk shapeless waffle on his feet in order to offset his
scholarly precision on the page.Besides,
Healey was an unequivocating advocate of nuclear deterrence, and would have had
a chance at the leadership only if he had equivocated. (Foot, who was helped to
the leadership by his advocacy of the opposite, equivocated in the other
direction in order to win the general election, and the strain helped to ensure
that he clamorously lost it.) Healey never flaunted his culture, but he could
not conceal it. It was there in the way he talked, and even in the way he
listened. He might demolish somebody else's argument in a few sentences, but he
took it in first.Healey
has an ear for rhythm, and anyone who has that will hear rhythm wherever it
occurs. He was delighted by every sharp mind he met. His reputation for
brutality might have arisen among those who knew that they did not delight him.
There was a sharp critical ability at the heart of his wide powers of
appreciation, and his excellent memoirs are a reminder that we should value the
kind of figure more interested in cultivating his mind than polishing his
image, even though he is likely to be sidelined by a man who is better at the
latter than the former.

Clive
James’ own highly exuberant style of writing can be excessive – and indeed does
often mar what is otherwise the incredible achievement of Cultural Amnesia
which gives vignettes of various figures (mainly literary) of the 20th
Century whom James considers worthy of remembrance. Quite a few are now
completely forgotten – and James is to be congratulated for bringing them back
to life. A sample of his (generally) cutting comments can be read here

I
always feel that James writes like a graphic artist – the sort who do the caricatures
which capture the essence of a person The painting is "The Builders" by Stanley Spencer

About Me

Can be contacted at bakuron2003@yahoo.co.uk
Political refugee from Thatcher's Britain (or rather Scotland) who has been on the move since 1991. First in central Europe - then from 1999 Central Asia and Caucasus. Working on EU projects - related to building capacity of local and central government. Home base is an old house in the Carpathian mountains and Sofia

about the blog

Writing in my field is done by academics - and gives little help to individuals who are struggling to survive in or change public bureaucracies. Or else it is propoganda drafted by consultants and officials trying to talk up their reforms. And most of it covers work at a national level - whereas most of the worthwhile effort is at a more local level. The restless search for the new dishonours the work we have done in the past. As Zeldin once said - "To have a new vision of the future it is first necessary to have new vision of the past".I therefore started this blog to try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history - particularly in the endeavour of what used to be known as "social justice". My generation believed that political activity could improve things - that belief is now dead and that cynicism threatens civilisationI also read a lot and wanted to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the time or inclination -as well as my love of painting, particularly the realist 20th century schools of Bulgaria and Belgium.A final motive for the blog is more complicated - and has to do with life and family. Why are we here? What have we done with our life? What is important to us? Not just professional knowledge - but what used to be known, rather sexistically, as "wine, women and song" - for me now in the autumn of my life as wine, books and art....

quotes

“I will act as if what I do makes a difference”
William James 1890.

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas"
JM Keynes (1935)

"We've spent half a century arguing over management methods. If there are solutions to our confusions over government, they lie in democratic not management processes"
JR Saul (1992)

"There are four sorts of worthwhile learning - learning about · oneself
· learning about things
· learning how others see us
· learning how we see others"
E. Schumacher (author of "Small is Beautiful" (1973) and Guide for the Perplexed (1977))

"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."
Bertrand Russell, 1950

Followers

der arme Dichter (Carl Spitzweg)

my alter ego

the other site

In 2008 I set up a website in the (vain) hope of developing a dialogue around issues of public administration reform - particularly in transition countries where I have been living and working for the past 26 years. The site is www.freewebs.com/publicadminreform and contains the major papers I have written over the years about my attempts to reform various public organisations in the various roles which I've had - politician; academic/trainer; consultant.